With GameSpot executive editor Greg Kasavin mentioning in his latest blog post that fighting games never surpassed Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, merely getting more flashy and complicated, now feels like a good time to post a February entry from my personal blog declaring the genre dead.
The fighting game genre is dead.
There hasn't been a truly new fighting game in years. Everything is a sequel, remix, or compilation. And calling the sequels sequels is pushing it; they add a few new characters and make minor changes and additions, but they're otherwise the same as their predecessors.
The genre refuses to evolve. It remains the only console-centric genre to rely on the digital directional pad instead of analog thumbsticks. Almost every fighting game still plays like Street Fighter II (1991) or Virtua Fighter (1993). Since the new games play like the old ones, making "improvements" means adding new things on top of already complicated games, making them too complex to attract new players and appealing only to existing fans.
Most attempts at doing something different fail either because what makes them different isn't implemented well or hardcore fighting game fans refuse to accept them (or both). Instead of attempting to better implement what made the different games different, developers choose to drop those changes in the followups, making them no different from their previous predecessors.
As existing fans lose interest and since new fans can't take their places, the market for fighting games shrinks and fewer and fewer are made.
And why do most 2D fighting games look like they were made in the mid-1990's? More importantly, why do most new 2D fighting games use sprites ripped from decade-old games?
But while the fighting genre is dead, its spirit remains. Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, wrote in a 1999 column (that inspired this entry) that adventure games were dead in part because key elements have been absorbed by the other game genres. The same now applies to fighting games. What made fighting games fighting games--deep combat systems and multiple, differentiated, playable characters--have been in other genres for years.
Perhaps the fighting genre can be revived in the future. Adventure games have made something of a comeback recently with Indigo Prophecy and the upcoming Dreamfall, which play nothing like the adventure games of old, getting the most buzz. Maybe, years from now, a new, unique fighting game will do the same for its genre.